{{Note| KDE 4.x is '''modular'''; you can install your preferred KDE applications without having to install an entire set of packages. See [[KDE Packages]] for more information.}}

{{Note| KDE 4.x is '''modular'''; you can install your preferred KDE applications without having to install an entire set of packages. See [[KDE Packages]] for more information.}}

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{{Note| KDE 4.x not need Gamin or Fam packages for monitoring changes on local files and directories [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE#Monitoring_changes_on_local_files_and_directories see more] }}

The KDE Software Compilation grew out of the history of the KDE Project. In its inception, KDE was formed to create a beautiful, functional and free desktop computing environment for Linux and similar operating system. At the time, these systems lacked a graphical user environment that could rival the offerings from the larger proprietary operating system vendors. KDE was created to fill this gap.

The KDE Software Compilation is the set of libraries, workspaces, and applications produced by KDE that share this common heritage, and continue to use the synchronized release cycle. Software may move in and out of this semi-formally defined collection depending on the particular needs of the contributors who are working on that software, with exceptions made to ensure that binary compatibility remains at the library level throughout any major release of the compilation.

KDE software consists of a large number of individual applications and a desktop workspace as a shell to run these applications. You can run KDE applications just fine on any desktop environment. KDE applications are built to integrate well with your system's components. By using also KDE workspace, you get even better integration of your applications with the working environment while lowering system resource needs.

Overview

KDE 4.6 Software Compilation is the current major release of KDE that includes a number of improvements and bug fixes. The new Arch package set for KDE makes it possible to only install those applications you like.

Arch Linux notes (KDE SC 4.6)

This release offers UPower, UDev and UDisks support that can be used instead of the deprecated HAL. For that, the hal package is no more a requirement of kdebase-workspace and can be removed from your system, unless it is needed by other packages.

KDE PIM 4.6 is yet not available, so we will continue with the 4.4 series.

Also, with the last Phonon update, the DEVs declared the Xine backend no longer maintained; you really should think to switch to the GStreamer or the VLC backend.

In case of any error, try using a new user account or (re)moving KDE's configuration which can be found at ~/.kde4 /tmp/kde- /var/tmp/kdecache-. Akonadi saves its data at ~/.config/akonadi and ~/.local/share/akonadi.

Using xinitrc

After a reboot or/and login, each execution of Xorg (startx or xinit) will start KDE automatically.

Warning: By doing this you may have restart/shutdown functions disabled in your KDE menu.

Note: If you want to start Xorg at boot, please read Start X at boot article.

Configuration

Note: Configuring KDE is primarily done in 'System Settings'. There are also a few other options available for the desktop with 'Desktop Settings' when you right click the desktop.

For other personalization options not covered below such as activities, different wallpapers on one cube, etc please refer to the Plasma wiki page.

Personalization

How to set up the KDE desktop to your personal style; use different Plasma themes, window decorations and icon themes.

Plasma Desktop

Plasma is a desktop integration technology that provides many functions from displaying the wallpaper, adding widgets to the desktop, and handling the panels or "taskbar".

Themes

Plasma themes can be installed through the Desktop Settings control panel. Plasma themes define how your panels and plasmoids look like. If you like to have them installed system-wide, themes can be found in both the official repositories and AUR.

Widgets

Plasmoids are little scripted or coded KDE apps that enhance the functionality of your desktop. There are two kinds, plasmoid scripts and plasmoid binaries.

Plasmoid binaries must be installed using PKGBUILDS from AUR. Or write your own PKGBUILD.

The easiest way to install plasmoid scripts is by right-clicking onto a panel or the desktop:

Add Widgets -> Get new Widgets -> Download Widgets

This will present a nice frontend for kde-look.org and allows you to (un)install or update third-party plasmoid scripts with just one click.

Most plasmoids are not created officially by KDE developers. You can also try installing Mac OS X widgets, Microsoft Windows Vista/7 widgets, Google Widgets, and even SuperKaramba widgets.

If you want also specify a font, you can add (and adapt) the following line to the file:

gtk-font-name="Sans Serif 9"

Icons

If you're using Oxygen icons and want a consistent look in GTK open/save dialogs, you can install an oxygenrefit2 icon theme from AUR and set it as your GTK icon theme. Add the theme to the Template:Filename file or you can use lxappearance and set it.

Icon Themes

Not many full system icons themes are available for KDE 4. You can open up System Settings > Application Appearance > Icons and browse for new ones or install them manually. Many of them can be found on kde-look.org.

Arch Linux Logo Icon in Kicker menu

Right click on the Kicker menu button, press Application launcher settings and then press the icon on the right. Then you may choose Arch Linux icon or any other icon that will replace the default one.

Official Arch Linux artwork icons are in archlinux-artwork package, available after installing at

Fonts

After the installation, be sure to log out and back in. You should not have to modify any settings in the "Fonts" panel of the KDE System Settings application.

If you have personally set up how your Fonts render, be aware that System Settings may alter their appearance. When you go System Settings > Appearance > Fonts System Settings will likely alter your font configuration file (Template:Filename).

There is no way to prevent this but if you set the values to match your Template:Filename file the expected font rendering will return (it will require you to restart your application or in a few cases for you to have to restart your desktop).

Note too that Gnomes' Font Preferences will also do this if you use both desktop environments.

Space efficiency

KDE is often criticized for being bloated.

The user might get this perception from seeing many toolbars and pretty big scaled icons in the applications. One thing that improved the situation was the new Kwin-Theme that came with KDE SC 4.4.* with the more elegant buttons that one can also resize. KDE Apps allows to hide many toolbars, menubars and statusbars.

All sorts of *bars

Most toolbars of a program can be removed in the menubar-entry "Settings". There you often can hide the statusbar and often all toolbars. The last step should be to remove the menubar itself via Ctrl + M.

If you do not want to remove any bars you can still make them smaller or remove the text via:

Since most aspect ratios of modern flat screens are wider than 4:3 it could be reasonable to put the toolbar at the left or right of a window to artificially stretch windows more to the monitors aspect ratio.

Plasma

There are also some settings and modifications you can apply to your plasmoids to make KDE less space wasting.

For example, the "Digital Clock" wastes more space than the "Analogue Clock". The little plasma icon ("Cashew") that one can see in the panel can be hidden by locking the widgets via rightklicking onto the panel.

If you have got many tasks in your task-manager you should consider using Smooth-tasks.

This alternative task-manager allows you to just display the icons of a task thus using less space but still maintaining the ability of the user to distinguish the different tasks.

After installing and substituting it with the original task-manager you should have a deep look at the settings since they are much broader.
one way of using the features of smooth-tasks could be to only display the icons of tasks and move the panel to the left or right of the screen. This is most useful on widescreens.

On very small screens it could be reasonable to set the bottom-panel to auto-hide completely.

For netbooks there is a special workspace, called Plasma Netbook, that makes better use of the screen:

System Settings -> Workspace Behavior -> Workspace -> Workspace Type

KWin

The windows decorations can also be resized by making the buttons in the decoration smaller thus making the whole top border smaller:

Networking

Printing

The printers are configured in this way can be found in applications KDE.

You can also choose the printer configuration through Systemsettings -> Printer Configuration. To use this method, you must first install the packages:

# pacman -S kdeadmin-system-config-printer-kde cups

Samba/Windows support

If you want to have access to Windows services:

pacman -S samba

You may then configure your Samba shares through

System Settings -> Sharing -> Samba

KDE Desktop Activities

KDE Desktop Activities are Plasma based "virtual desktop"-like set of Plasma Widgets where you can independently configure widgets as if you had more than one screens/desktops.
Since KDE 4.5, the feature of changing Desktop Activities has been simplified.

On your desktop, click the Cashew Plasmoid and on the pop-up window press "Activities".

A plasma bar will appear at the bottom of the screen which presents you the current Plasma Desktop Activities which exist. You can then navigate between them by pressing their correspondent icon.

Powersaving

KDE has integrated Powersaving service called "Powerdevil Power Management" that may adjust the powersaving profile of the system or/and the brightness of the screen (if supported).

How to enable Cpufreq based powersaving

Since KDE 4.5, Powerdevil doesn't handle CPU power schemes through Cpufreq. CPU scaling is defined by the hardware and/or kernel "ondemand" governor power scheme and that's the official way to have the system's power management handled, according to the guidelines by the kernel power-management devs.

Note: Despite the claim in the link above, it seems that CPU does not scale without cpufreq. Also, in Arch the default governor is "performance" and not "ondemand", so the user still needs to install the cpufrequtils package and add the "cpufreq_ondemand" module in the modules array in rc.conf.

You can easily use the desired governors through the cpufreq commands.

In order to do that, follow these steps:

1. Install cpufrequtils

pacman -S cpufrequtils

and make sure you have your CPU's cpufreq module loaded. For more information on this, visit this article.

2. Then, in System Settings > Power Management, go to "Power Profiles" menu.

You can now create a new profile or edit the previous ones.

If you would like to have cpufrequtils as the software that will manage the CPU's powersaving behavior, type the following command in the "Script" text box:

cpufreq-set -g ondemand

3. Now select the "Performance" profile and type this command in the "Script" text box:

cpufreq-set -g performance

You don't have to enable the "Enable System power saving" check box for this profile.

Note: KDE 4.6 introduced a new power management framework and "solid-powermanagement", that could be previously used, is no longer a valid command. It appears there is no longer a KDE method to set the CPU frequency governor. However, "cpufreq-set -g ondemand" has the same affect. You can enter that in the script text box as above. If that fails, and you are happy with using the ondemand governor all the time, you can have this command executed at startup by placing it in "/etc/rc.local".

Monitoring changes on local files and directories

KDE uses inotify directly from kernel using kdirwatch(inside in kdelibs), so Gamin or FAM aren't needed, if you want see if kdirwatch is working probably you are interested install gui for kdirwatch (kdirwatch from aur)

System Administration

Set keyboard layout in order switch language inputs

In order to do that, navigate to

System Settings > Input Devices > Keyboard

There you may choose your keyboard model at first.

Note: It is preferable that, if you use Evdev, that means Xorg automatic configuration for keyboards, you should choose "Evdev-managed keyboard".

In the "Layouts" tab, you choose the languages you may want to use by pressing the "Add Layout" button and therefore the variant and the language.
In the "Advanced" tab, you can choose the keyboard combination you want in order to change the layouts in the "Key(s) to change layout" sub-menu.

Terminate Xorg-server through KDE system settings

Desktop Search and Semantic Desktop

Most users who freshly install KDE are wondering what functionality the following four pieces of software are able to offer. Most features are still somehow hidden under the hood and yet not many applications featured in the KDE SC are using these interfaces. This chapter intends to first explain the features and then convince the user of the power these tools offer once properly integrated into KDE. The following sections are more or less a roughly shortened version of this blogpost.

Soprano

Soprano is a library for QT that is able to process RDF data. This is semantic data. Semantic data is a special kind of metadata which is much more flexible than metadata you might know from MP3-Tags or Meta-Tags in HTML since RDF data more resembles the structure of a spoken sentence, thus allowing a much wider field of ways dealing with them. Soprano stores semantic data in a backend and allows low level access to this data.

Nepomuk

Nepomuk is somehow the glue between Soprano and the KDE Desktop and thus the user. Nepomuk allows to tag the files with various entries and offers an API for the applications featured in KDE SC. It is enabled by default. Nepomuk can be turned on and off in

System Settings -> Desktop Search

Nepomuk has to keep the trace of a lot of files, because of that is recommended to increase the number of files that can be watched with inotify, to do that:

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288

To do it persistant:

echo "fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

And restart Nepomuk.

Akonadi

Akonadi is one of the ways of getting data into Nepomuk. Its intention is to gather all kinds of PIM data from KMail, KAdressbook or Kopete. It collects chat contacts, email addresses, email attachments and email contents. First of all it feeds Nepomuk with this data but moreover it provides a centralized access point for all this data.

Disabling Akonadi

If you don't want Akonadi to be ran in your system (for your own reasons), edit ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc and turn

StartServer=true

to

StartServer=false

And then relogin into your account.

Configuring Akonadi to use MySQL Server running on the System

First, you need to set up the database using the following commands (replace password with the correct one):

Strigi Search

Strigi is another way of feeding data into Nepomuk. It preferably indexes the users home-folder. Indexing means that it not only gathers filenames but also information about your music collection or tagged downloads you did with Kget. The Strigi search is also integrated into KDEs launcher which can be accessed via:
Template:Keypress + Template:Keypress

By default, Dolphin has a search bar on top-right where you may type what you want to be found from Strigi's index.

Note: Strigi has implications for resource usage on your computer - CPU, memory, disk access, disk space, battery life. If Strigi is too resource-hungry for you, you can turn it off in "System Settings -> Desktop Search".

KDM (KDE Desktop Manager)

KDM Xserver file

An example configuration for KDM can be found at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc. See /usr/share/doc/HTML/en/kdm/kdmrc-ref.docbook for all options.

Configuring KDM

You can visit System Settings > Login Screen and make your changes. Whenever you press "Apply", a KDE Polkit authorization window appears which will ask you to give your root password in order to finish the changes.

Problems while Configuring KDM as a user

If you seem not to be able to KDM settings when launching System Settings as user, press

In the pop-up kdesu window, enter your root password and wait for System Settings to be launched.

Note: Since you have launched it as root, be careful when changing your settings. All settings configuration in root-launched System Settings are saved under /root/.kde4 and not under ~/.kde4 (your home location).

In the System Settings window, go to Login Screen.

Phonon

What is Phonon?

Phonon is the multimedia API for KDE 4. Phonon was created to allow KDE 4 to be independent of any single multimedia framework such as GStreamer or xine and to provide a stable API for KDE 4's lifetime. It was done for various reasons: to create a simple KDE/Qt style multimedia API, to better support native multimedia frameworks on Windows and Mac OS X, and to fix problems of frameworks becoming unmaintained or having API or ABI instability.

from Wikipedia.

Phonon is being widely used within KDE, for both audio (e.g., the System notifications or KDE audio apps) and video (e.g., the Dolphin video thumbnails).

How to use in Konqueror

On the "General" submenu, select the "WebKit" as the "Default web browser engine".

You can, of course, choose KHTML again, if you don't like WebKit as the rendering engine.

Troubleshooting

KDE and Qt programs look bad when in a different window manager

If you're using KDE or Qt programs but not in a full KDE session (specifically, you didn't run "startkde"), then as of KDE 4.6.1 you will need to tell Qt how to find KDE's styles (Oxygen, QtCurve etc.)

You just need to set the environment variable QT_PLUGIN_PATH. E.g. put

Graphical related issues

Low 2D desktop performance (or) Artifacts appear when on 2D

GPU driver problem

Make sure you have the proper driver for your card installed, so that your desktop is at least 2D accelerated. Follow these articles for more information: ATI, NVIDIA, Intel for more information, in order to make sure that everything is all right.
The open-source ATI and Intel drivers and the proprietary (binary) Nvidia driver should theoretically provide the best 2D and 3D acceleration.

The Raster engine workaround

If this doesn't solve your problems, maybe your driver doesn't provide a good XRender acceleration which the current Qt painter engine relies on by default.

You can change the painter engine to software based only by invoking the application with the "-graphicssystem raster" command line. This rendering engine can be set as the default one by recompiling Qt with the same as configure option, "-graphicssystem raster".

The raster paint engine enables the CPU to do the majority of the painting, as opposed to the GPU. You may get better performance, depending on your system. This is basically a work-around for the terrible Linux driver stack, since the CPU should obviously not be doing graphical computations since it is designed for fewer threads of greater complexity, as opposed to the GPU which is many threads but lesser computational strength.

Since Qt 4.7+, recompiling Qt is not needed. Simply export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=raster, or "opengl", or "native" (for the default). Raster depends on the CPU, OpenGL depends on the GPU and high driver support (it's buggy and highly in development, so I wouldn't expect it to work), and Native is just using the X11 rendering (mixture, usually).

The best and automatic way to do that is to install kcm-qt-graphicssystem from AUR and configure this particular Qt setting through

Note: You may encounter such problems with 3D desktop performance even when using a more powerful graphics card, but using catalyst proprietary driver (fglrx). This driver is known for having issues with 3D acceleration. Visit the ATi Wiki page for more troubleshooting.

Desktop compositing is disabled on my system with a modern Nvidia GPU

Sometimes, KWin may have settings in it's configuration file (kwinrc) that may cause a problem on re-activating the 3D desktop OpenGL compositing. That could be caused randomly (for example, due to a sudden Xorg crash or restart, and it gets corrupted), so, in case that happens, delete your ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc file and relogin. The KWin settings will turn to the KDE default ones and the problem should be probably gone.

This forces KWin not to use window unredirection but can affect performance of fullscreen OpenGL applications when desktop effects are enabled. Desktop effects can be suspended to prevent performance issues (press Alt+Shift+F12) before running such applications.

OSS4 related problems

If you have OSS4 installed and encounter any problems you should be aware that developers of Kmix are still integrating OSSv4 support. There is an AUR package that is still experimental.
Arch uses phonon with the Gstreamer backend that should work for most applications. Alternately you could try phonon with Xine.

Arch linux specific packaging issues

Due to some upgrades on the packages or a newer versioned pacman with bugs (pft, like there are any ;) there could be some problems during upgrading. Please read the sections below, if you have a problem.

I wanted a minimal installation of KDE. After I installed some packages and logged in KDE, there are no panels

If you wanted a minimal installation of KDE, logged in, heard the login sound but nothing else happened, you may not have installed the Plasma binaries. These are included in

kdebase-workspace

Install this package and restart Xorg.

I want a fresh installation of KDE for my system. What should I do?

Just rename the settings directory of KDE (just in case you'll want to go back to your original settings):

mv ~/.kde4 ~/.kde4-backup

Plasma desktop behaves strangely

Plasma issues are usually caused by unstable plasmoids or plasma themes. First, find which was the last plasmoid or plasma theme you had installed and disable it or uninstall it.

So, if your desktop suddenly exhibits "locking up", this is likely caused by a faulty installed widget. If you cannot remember which widget you installed before the problem began(sometimes it can be an irregular problem), try to track it down by removing each widget until the problem ceases. Then you can uninstall the widget, and file a bug report (bugs.kde.org) only if it is an official widget. If it is not, I recommend you find the entry on kde-look.org and inform the developer of that widget about the issue (detailing steps to reproduce, etc).

If you cannot find the problem, but you do not want all the KDE settings to be lost, do:

rm -r ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma*

This command will delete all plasma related configs of your user and when you will relogin into KDE, you will have the default settings back. You should know that this action cannot be undone. You ought to create a backup folder and copy all the plasma related configs in it.

Hiding partitions

If you wish to prevent your internal partitions from appearing in your file manager, you can create a udev rule, for example Template:Filename:

KERNEL=="sda[0-9]", ENV{UDISKS_PRESENTATION_HIDE}="1"

The same thing for a certain partition:

KERNEL=="sda1", ENV{UDISKS_PRESENTATION_HIDE}="1"

Konsole doesn't save commands' history

By default console commands' history is saved only when you type 'exit' in console. When you close Konsole with 'x' in the corner it doesn't happen.
To enable autosaving after every command execution you should add following lines into your .bashrc

KDE Legacy

Along with the official KDE4, the KDE3 code "lives" under the fork project called "Trinity".

Unofficial community repository for KDE 3

From the release of KDE 4.x, the developers dropped support for KDE 3.5.x. Nevertheless you can still use KDE 3.5.x through a project called kdemod3In this thread. The current rebuild of the unsupported KDEmod3 is based on the Trinity project code (KDE 3.5.12). See Trinity on Arch Linux below.

Warning: KDE 3 is no longer maintained and supported by the KDE developers. The "Trinity KDE" is maintained by the Trinity project commmunity. KDEmod3 is no longer maintained by the Chakra Projects developers. Use KDE 3 on your own risk, regarding any bugs, performance issues or security risks.

Trinity on Arch Linux

Trinity SVN is currently KDE 3.5.13. An unofficial effort to provide a working set of PKGBUILDs for Trinity for Arch Linux is in the beginning stages and produces a working KDE 3.5.13 desktop for Arch Linux. Links for binary packages built from the Trinity SVN code as well as the PKGBUILDs are available. For details on this effort, see the Trinity Arch wiki: